ANATOMY OF TORTURE — Historian Christopher Dietrich on the 100-year-long history of American torture; Jeffrey St. Clair on the implications of giving impunity to the CIA’s torturers; Chris Floyd on how the US has exported torture to its client states around the world. David Macaray on the Paradoxes of Police Unions; Louis Proyect on Slave Rebellions in the Open Seas; Paul Krassner on the Perils of Political Cartooning; Martha Rosenberg on the dangers of Livestock Shot-up with Antibiotics; and Lee Ballinger on Elvis, Race and the Poor South. Plus: Mike Whitney on Greece and the Eurozone and JoAnn Wypijewski on Media Lies that Killed.

Emergency War Supplemental Explained

"House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she is committed to passing an emergency war supplemental [funding bill for Pentagon expenses in Afghanistan] before the July Fourth recess, Roll Call reports."

Why is this an "emergency"?

The longed for (since Clinton-time, when Bill hosted the Taliban in Washington to bribe them into the scheme) Unocal Pipeline, aimed at draining the Caspian Basin oil (from Kazakhstan, etc.) through Afghanistan and Pakistan (which is why the US is "investing" by bombardment in these impoverished outlands), thus diluting Iran’s oil export economic clout, and gaining control of vast oil reserves close to China — and thus denying the PRC a major source of economic (and political = military) growth potential — will still be there if McCrystal or any other US Jugheads are pulled out of Afghanistan.

The Russians are trying to develop a lateral pipeline, cobbled together with proposed agreements with the Caspian Region Oil-i-stans, and running west to Turkey for loading to tankers. The Russians run gas pipelines west now, to Europe (e.g., winter heating in Germany), and have had some tiffs with the Ukrainians (who owed for Russian gas bought and used) about them (they run through territories of some republics south of Russia proper). The Chinese want pipelines running east (from the Caspian region) and northeast (from Iran). The US plan it to short-circuit both Russian and Chinese oil-power dreams, and shove in its own north-to-south catheter, to spill out at tanker ports to be built on the Pakistani coast.

Then the US Navy could "guard" such oil embarkation points, and just as conveniently be in position to block (excuse me, "guard") the exit of the Persian Gulf, by the Iranian coast. The point of the game is not about consuming oil, though that certainly is a lavish benefit of having a winning position; the point is to be in control of the sources of oil that EVERYBODY has to rely on. Whoever achieves that becomes the world’s zookeeper: who doles out the food to the captive beasts, and can reward and punish those that resist being trained for the tricks to be performed in the master’s circus.

And, just like in any gang of kids in a schoolyard, or clods in a shopping mall, or suckers in a casino, the US doesn’t want to "miss out" by walking away from the game (because the game is stupid, wasteful, immoral and fatally corrosive to any qualities worth having in a domestic society) thus "letting somebody else get the goods." US planners know that the decay of US economic and military power (because the whole shithouse over here is collapsing from failures in every dimension of societal construction) only decreases the likelihood of the US capturing the prize in the future.

So, the "emergency" is to get in and grab the prize ("one ring to bind them all") ASAP, before "we" (i.e., our capitalist masters) lose more of the US power and advantages in being able to do so. Dead soldiers, collapsed economies, poisoned environments, sullied national honor, dispirited populations, these are mere trivialities in comparison to the prize: chips tossed into the pot.

What you see in the U.S. today is the living embodiment of Lord Acton’s dictum: "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." We, in the "domestic economy" are the starved, withered and wasted body of a mad power-addicted capitalist management mentality, delirious with a greed that goes beyond money, and beyond all reason or human feeling. All our "issues":

– the debasement of public education into a rote public indoctrination system for purposes of social control by capitalist management (training and pruning the thought processes of today’s children, to be the robot mass consuming the future socialized waste of exclusionary "private" profiteering);

– the gutting of public services (planned penury of local government by passionate conservatism);

– the gaming of the national financial system and the theft of public resources (tax give-away subsidized profit insurance for the "too-big-to-fail" financial gamesters);

– the absolute intransigence of US policy-makers to drop Israel and that whole piratical racist-colonialist scheme;

– the ever-widening fiscal black hole of Pentagon consumption of national resources, and its excessive political influence;

– and the direct result of that spending, the erosion of civil rights by actual human individuals (as opposed to corporate ‘personhoods’);

all the failings of US policy today are a direct result of the mad mis-focus on global power addiction by the nation’s capitalist management class, and the unthinking adherence by so much of the public to the dehumanized roles — as individual greed-consumption positive feedback loops — cast for them by the national management’s social programmers (no need to read, your instructions will be televised).

This is why Pelosi has an "emergency" on her hands, and is rushing to whip Congress into a supportive response. If you were a person who counted, you would understand. If you don’t get it, then you’re not supposed to: just do what you’re told when the time comes: consume, conform, obey. (Just to be clear, hiding out and "doing nothing" falls under "obedience").

The only other option is rebellion (L’Homme révolté, see Camus), and this can be a risky thing to realize in any individual life. But, it could make you human, and I think that knowing that you’ve achieved real humanity is the only way one can ever reconcile to death .